HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use 3PAR as our primary storage array.

We have been able to scale faster and get our applications out in much less time. We don't need to worry about the platform's ability to manage the workload, so we are pretty happy.

Our VMware platform sits on 3PAR. We also have databases, ERP applications, and websites running on it. 

All-Flash also positions our organization for growth. It certainly has its place. We don't use All-Flash because the performance of the existing arrays knows the job, but I certainly see where if we are doing data-intensive operations it could assist us.

We deployed InfoSight predictive analytics not too long ago. It improved our management of VMs. We are now able to see a lot more using InfoSight and we have a pretty good idea of exactly what's going on in our storage array.

The storage array absolutely increases performance. Compared with what we had before 3PAR, this has certainly done its job.

The solution has also helped us reduce time to deployment, I would say by at least 30%. It's easier for us to deploy. We get our servers up and running quickly and that way we support our environment faster so we can be more agile.

It has also significantly improved throughput, so we don't need to worry about performance for any of our platforms.

The ease of maintenance is what is most valuable for us. We don't need to worry about upgrading the platform. HPE takes care of it for us.

Deduplication functionality is pretty good. We have had it for quite a few years. We are pretty impressed with their capabilities and we've never really had a problem.

As it is, it does its job very well, so it's very difficult for me to say what we should be looking for in the next platform. I think cloud integration would probably be the biggest part because that's where everyone is going and the seamless integration between on-premise and cloud is an important part of any IT strategy today.

It's very stable.

Also, the solution's availability is remarkable. We have never had a breakdown over a storage array.

It's very scalable as well. We never had a problem where that is concerned.

They are pretty good at what they do. Those guys fix whatever the problem is. We just kind of plug it in and leave. We don't look back at it again.

We previously used HPE. We had to upgrade because our previous platform was end of life.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The guys knew what they're doing and I have a technical team to assist as well.

HPE did the deployment for us. Their onboarding process is pretty good.

We have absolutely seen a return on our investment. I don't have numbers offhand, but the organization has certainly grown significantly as a result of the kind of platform that we have deployed.

All of the tier one vendors were on there: Dell EMC, etc. From a perspective of price point, performance, and integrity, we felt that HPE gave us the best value.

It's not necessarily about the price. The price is certainly an important factor, but what the solution does and how it supports you is even more important than price.

Our biggest lesson was that we need to do our homework and make sure that we're going with a vendor that can support us in the long term.

I would probably rate this as eight and a half out of ten. It does what it's supposed to and does that very well, even if there are areas to improve on. More integration with cloud would be great. But what it does, it does very well.

We have two use cases: 

1. We use it with our internal applications, so for internal use. 
2. We are provider of national research computing infrastructure. Therefore, we are using it out there with all our systems.

There are not many mission critical applications or processes that we run on 3PAR. The mission critical applications are usually the ones for internal university purposes, like ERP systems. Our research systems are not a mission critical since our researchers can run their computing again in a week. 

If it runs, and you don't know about it, that is the best thing that you can have in IT infrastructure. This is what 3PAR does for us.

It is very fast and has effective processing. 

I want artificial intelligence. I don't want anybody from my team to touch it anymore. I want the AI to do everything. I see this as a piece of hardware, which I don't want see and don't want to care about. I want some AI over it, not because I want to fire all my team, but what I want my team working on is definitely not to take care of our hardware.

It has basically never failed. It is a very stable thing in our environment. We don't have such experience with the other things that we have.

3PAR's availability is fantastic and the maximum.

We are just a customer, who bought a solution and are running it. We don't really do much about it. From what I know, the scalability should be okay. Generally, it was one of the reasons why we purchased 3PAR, because we believed we will grow, etc. However, it is difficult in the public sector if you can't do an RFP for a specific product. So, you need to live with whatever you buy or whatever is the best combination on the market. 

We haven't really purchase any more 3PARs after our initial buy, and that was a few years ago.

I have never used the technical support, but my team is okay with it. At the time when we implemented 3PAR into our environment, we really needed some help. We had some issues, which were mostly on our side, but my team was very satisfied with the support.

We previously used a number of small servers with disks attached to it, distributed all over to data centers. This was absolutely not effective and terrible.

We had quite obsolete infrastructure. We were thinking about whether we should just upgrade it a little bit or if we should take a different path. At that time, a few years ago, 3PAR for us was a change to a very different type of storage. Today, I would say that it is standard. However, at that time, it was a change. We wanted to improve and start doing things differently. In general, at the time, 3PAR was from today's perspective, like implementing AI over our whole infrastructure. It was a giant leap forward.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't need any complex preparation or changing a lot of things in our environment to integrated it. It was quite straightforward. Bringing books and bringing it into the lab in a few days, then everything was migrated. It was very easy.

We had a reseller helping us implement it, then we took over. The experience with our Czech reseller was great. 

We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying.

3PAR has increased your performance. At the time that we purchased 3PAR, it was much more powerful than any of our previous storage.

3PAR has helped our company reduce the time to deployment by 60 percent. It is easier than before.

The solution has improved our throughput.

We did evaluate other vendors originally. We looked at Dell EMC and all the competitors in the market. We chose HPE because they had the best technology and performance.

We have had a very good experience with 3PAR, so we will probably not be looking at different vendors or solutions.

Definitely look at 3PAR. It is worth it.

We do use the Memory-Drive Flash. We don't have any problems with latency anymore that we had eons ago. However, I can't really tell you from a technical perspective if it was from implementing 3PAR or something else.

We do not use InfoSight predictive analytics yet, but I would like to.

The biggest lesson learned is 3PAR is good, and I want it for future. Let us find a way how to do it. It was a giant leap in technology at the time that we purchased it, and I would like to do the same next time, which will be very close. While I wouldn't say not to buy a 3PAR again, we will need a new technology that will do the giant leap forward again. We need a big step once every few years instead of doing granular steps every year.

The our primary use cases for 3PAR are:

• We have some secure applications which use it.
• We have some built-in, embedded applications that we use on it. 
• We have some major critical applications which run on 3PAR. 
• We are using flash arrays 2850 and 8440.

The company has been using 3PAR for approximately eight to 10 years. I joined in 2015, and since the day I joined, we had these 8440s flash arrays. Lately, this year only, we bought these new flash arrays, because we had some issues with the 8440s, especially with the drives. After we migrated the 8440s to the 2850s, we have not been seeing performance issues anymore. It seems as if all of the performance issues have disappeared, which is a big achievement.

With the new flash arrays, 3PAR has improved our performance. Also, the new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) tool is more user-friendly.

We are using the SSMC tool. In combination with it, there is a lot happening around InfoSight, and we are spending a lot of time on it. It does seem like there is some additional functionality built into InfoSight that we can use effectively.

We need additional enhancements to InfoSight, especially from a VM standpoint. Today, we can see in the Azure VM performance stats in 3PAR, but it is so huge, we can't just drill down on each and every VM and look at its performance. We want to add rates of performance issues from VM points of time frame. Therefore, we can look, for example at 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and see how the VMs performed. That particularly feature is not there today in InfoSight.

We are also seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard. E.g., if the 3PAR is not completely healthy because the remote copy helps are not performing, the dashboard will show all green, so there are some additional enhancements required. 

We are not seeing any issues. No hardware failures.

I would rate stability as a nine out of 10.

I would rate scalability as a nine out of 10.

I would rate technical support as a nine out of 10.

As a storage admin, my return on investment is having the system up at all times functioning properly and seeing no performance issues. This is what we are seeing after we recently migrated to our new flash arrays.

Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries. 

We are a multi-vendor shop, even today. We do have some IBM storage in our environment, but most of our critical applications sit on 3PAR.

I will recommend going with the all-flash arrays, especially on 3PAR, because that is something that I have personally experience with and I have not seen any issues.

For the P10400, we didn’t license many of the features that would have made this product really shine. We bought it for its advertised scalability, active-active controller design, and uptime (non-disruptive upgrades, port virtualization, etc.). We have not upgraded its capacity, controller count, or connection count since we’ve bought it so the scalability piece really didn’t make much difference for us. The uptime piece, however, has been 100% since initial start-up which is great. Although we cannot service the unit ourselves, cage level availability and the support team that takes care of the InForm OS updates and failed hardware have made it a great array for simply servicing I/O with nothing fancy added in.

The 7400 array is where things really start to shine for us on products and features. We initially bought this array as a production replacement of a set of EVA’s for file services and VMWare. As such it was important to us to have a reliable array that would balance itself, and was easier to upgrade than the P10400. It needed to support new OS’s fairly quickly and also have non-disruptive upgrades. We put that to the test when we added our test environment to the array. In that upgrade, only six months after initial purchase, it was very important that we could keep our test I/O from disrupting the production environment, so priority optimization became an important feature. We added two controllers, and doubled the size of the array to accommodate our test environment, and did so without downtime. The priority optimization is a real-time QoS component of the array that can be changed without disruption and takes effect in seconds. The six fibre ports per controller allow me to segregate I/O streams from VMWare and Windows to keep from having queue length and buffer issues or to simply balance out I/O load.

3PAR, in general, has helped us speed up deployments and better track our I/O consumption. We are able to speed up deployments because we are no longer having to install a vendor specific DSM/MPIO on top of the Microsoft OS or Linux ones as we did with the EVA line. System reporter allows us a more in depth look at our I/O utilization patterns in an easy to gather and archive way.

Licensing is still a pain point. It has gotten better, as any spindle count based licensing is capped at a certain number of spindles depending on the model of the array, but it is still expensive as you must buy every feature. Many of the arrays available from competitors come with just one or two licenses to buy which cover the entire array no matter the spindle count. The arrays are also not very user serviceable, which is something I miss about the EVA. A field tech must come out to replace a drive which is something I could do myself with the EVA.

I've used the P10400 for three years, and I would rate it 7/10. Alongside this, I've been using the 7400 for one and half years, and say it's 8/10.

Also, we are not currently using 3PAR flash storage but are planning an implementation. We are currently looking into flash to speed up our MS SQL for the logs and TempDB LUN’s. We are also looking into it as a possible future deployment for an as yet not deployed VDI implementation.

We didn’t encounter any issues with deployment. The pre-deployment guides were comprehensive and prepared us well for actual deployment of the product.

We have only expanded the 7400, doubling its size in disk and controller count, and did it without any issues.

None yet.

High. We have “proactive” support, so many times they are calling me about issues before or right as I see the alerts. Our account support manager reviews our environment twice a year to discuss any issues we have had and any recommendations from HP on how the systems are performing.

High. Updates to the InForm OS and firmware have gone off without incident. When something was wrong with the HBA ports resetting, they brought in additional resources from other areas to resolve it. The issue turned out to be a problem with the fibre channel switches fill word instead of the array.

We were using HP EVA and direct attached storage. Our EVA’s were getting old and needed to be replaced within a year or two. The push to replace them sooner came after our main production array crashed due to LUN ownership issues between the controllers. A lot of I/O was coming into the non-owning controller and so it would switch ownership. Since ownership was set to fail-over/fail-back it would just keep hoping back and forth. It was a problem with VMWare losing its MPIO configuration but that caused major issues with the array. True Active-Active controller design really became an important criteria after this incident.

Both. The v400 was a complex setup where the 7400 was much more straightforward. The v400 had many requirements for how cables were run, specific hole sizes and cuts in the raised floor tiles, and the installation guide that the HP Field Technicians used was either out of date or incorrect in several places causing installation to take longer than it should have. In contrast, the 7400 had none of the requirements, as it was mounted in a more traditional style rack and the installation process was more mature. The service processor could now be deployed as a VMWare appliance and set up by the customer ahead of time.

We used a vendor team with in-house support where needed. The vendor team was much more knowledgeable on the 7400 installation than the v400. We had bought the v400 not long after HP acquired 3PAR so there were some issues there. However, the local installation team had a “quick” line into 3PAR support for installation so we weren’t waiting around for support to answer questions.

It was never calculated for these arrays outside of cost to buy new against the cost of continuing support of the existing arrays. It has been several years since we upgraded the class of array and type of support.

The original setup was about $700,000 for the v400 and $350,000 for the 7400. The day to day cost is negligible in terms of support as they are really stable arrays.

We evaluated the Hitachi VSP and Netapp FAS 6800.

Do your homework and follow the deployment guides, it will save time and headaches. If you do not license at least Direct Optimization the array cannot re-level the data so the array will eventually not preform to peak efficiency as you add and remove data.

It hosts our virtualization platform. It works really well.

We do not have to take the whole system down now to do upgrades.

It is very easy to use. That is its best feature.

What I would like to see the SSMC management interface and the regular, Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interface. I would have to use both, because one of them has features, the other one does not, and vice versa.

It is very stable.

Scalability is improving. We have some 7400s, 8200s, and 8400s. So, we can scale pretty well.

With the support that our organization has, I can talk to someone right away if I have an issue. It has been very good.

We were using HPE EVA. We had a lot of issues with it to begin with. Anytime you wanted to do an upgrade, you had to take systems offline. That just would not work for us.

We switched when our warranties were up.

It was a bit complex in the wiring of the cages. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward.

We also evaluated Dell. We chose 3PAR because of price and functionality.

There are some things out there now, such as HPE SimpliVity that do more things, and maybe we would like to go in that direction. Right now, we are doing a PoC with HPE SimpliVity. It seems to be working well, especially the backup solution that it has with it, where you can do snapshots. We really like that since 3PAR does not have this.

I am not on the latest release yet. We are still trying to get there. The people that I work with at HPE have recommended where we should be in our version. We are not to the 3.3 version yet. I am looking forward to upgrading, because you can do them yourself. You do not have to have HPE do them. Also, it will integrate with InfoSight, which I am looking forward to.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: In our case, price is usually the biggest factor, because we are a university and have no money. Price is always big when we make a decision.

Our primary use case for 3PAR is our EMR application. We're in healthcare. We also use it for virtualization. The performance is excellent.

Backups were huge. We take a lot of SAN-level Snapshots and it has been phenomenal in that aspect.

When we bought it, the big sell for us was what they called "wide striping," how they striped the data and could get performance on a cheaper disk. Nowadays, the newer models that are out, which we are going to in the next couple of years, the most valuable feature is mainly being able to achieve such high IOPS in such a small chassis.

In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyperconverged. They are working that way with Greenlake and integrating their own "build your own" expansion environment within 3PAR.

I would like to see some of the InfoSight integration. In the speech today, here at HPE Discover 2018, it was pretty clear that that is where it's heading.

I think it's on track, on the whole, as far as where we're going. I'm probably two years away, maybe less, from a 3PAR purchase. LIkely, by the time I'm ready to buy, it's going to be in there.

We have had one major hardware failure in the last seven years and nothing went down because of it. It was a controller failure. It's a four-node cluster so end-users didn't even notice an impact in performance. Nobody was in a panic besides me. In the end it worked out, they just replaced it.

We're at right around 700 or 750 terabytes raw, and we're about maxed out for the version we're in, without a wholesale swap-out of our drives and drive architecture. From a scalability standpoint, we can add to it but we have to add more controllers. But we're in an older version. The newer versions have gotten better, faster, stronger. Probably the next step is going to be Greenlake and that avenue.

We went from an old XP24k, a long time ago, to an EMC VNX. The EMC storage was cheap on the front-end but expensive on the back-end for maintaining it. It was cheaper for us to jump into another 3PAR than it was to maintain support on the VNX. We quickly moved to 3PAR and we haven't looked back since.

In terms of important criteria in selecting a vendor besides price, we're primarily an HPE shop. I can count on one hand how many other pieces of hardware we have other than HPE: a Palo Alto firewall and maybe a couple of vendor-supplied Dell boxes. I always look to HPE first. If they can't do it, I call and complain to my regional sales VP and he tries his best. Sometimes he can pull one out and get something going for me, but if not then I start looking at others.

I was involved in the initial setup but we did have Professional Services come in and set it up because we didn't have any training at the time. The setup was a while ago, but it took longer to unbox it because our reseller messed up and sold us all the individual boxes for every single drive. So the implementation guy wasn't very happy: four pallets of itty bitty boxes for every single hard drive. But soup to nuts, with that problem in play, the setup took about a week. If he didn't have all that, it probably could have been done in a day.

Overall the setup is very straightforward. It's just like any other enterprise storage. If you set up one you've set them all up, as it were. They're the same idea, different architecture.

From a comparison of bang for the buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best.

We've looked at Pure Storage, we've looked at Kaminario. We've looked at EMC's new VMAX. From a price standpoint, what you get - and with us moving towards VDI and having Synergy frames and SimpliVity on the market - it doesn't really make sense to switch. Do you really want to pull away now after you have invested so much? 

It's a matter of: "They're going down the right path so just keep following it." The reason we jumped ship for VNX back when we did was that, at the time, HPE stepped away from SAN and storage. Those were their bad years of MSA versus EVA and dropping away. They didn't really have an offering that fit that mid-tier storage that we were at. We had to do something. "Once bitten, twice shy", so now we'll look at EMC, we'll look at other vendors, but I always have a feeling we're going to come back to 3PAR.

My current 3PAR, three years ago I would have rated it a 10 out of 10. Today, just because it's aged, I'd give it a solid seven. It's because the drive architecture has changed over the years. Comparing it to the new ones that are out... it comes back to "better, faster, stronger." Without me spending another six figures to swap out hundreds of terabytes of storage, I can't get the added performance. It comes down to me making a critical decision of, "Okay, how do I balance my current IOPS, deliver what I need to deliver to my customer, and still meet the budget?"

One of the things that I really liked about the 3PAR solution, going back to the architecture, is its unified architecture for their entire suite of products. Companies like NetApp and EMC, have a very broad spectrum of products, but as you go through their portfolio, the way that they're managed, the way that their team would have to interact with our product, it differs. So I was looking for a platform that would allow us to scale, because as we know, data is not becoming less and less. It's increasing. So if some day we need to increase the SAN that we have right now. I feel very comfortable that if I was to choose another product within the 3PAR suite, that my team could get it off and running off the ground very quickly

Flash as a solution for us was very obvious. Reason being, as I mentioned before, we're very data intensive. For the longest time, disc has been our bottleneck in our processing service, in our processing capabilities. With flash, we have no concerns. So it's been a very, very great and positive experience for us

We've seen a huge improvement in processing times and coming from a traditional SAN over to the HP 3PAR all flash solution, we saw about a 90 percent reduction in the processing time to some of the batch processors that we were running, which for us is very, very huge.

I would like to see a little bit more of automated reporting. As an IT director, I would like to get a better view, high level view of how the environment is performing instead of having to go and ask my guys. That would be my only future request.

Oh, it's been incredible stability. Here's an anecdote. The solution we were on before was a dual controller solution which is kind of a misnomer because the way that the system balances itself, if you have any controller that's running a bit higher than the other, say, 50, 60 percent, and one controller goes down, well, that one controller now has to take the additional load from the other controller. So what we realized at one point was, we had a controller that had to do down for maintenance, and during that maintenance window, we had some performance issues, because the one controller had to pick up the load for the other controller, and it caused our environment to run slower than we would have liked

With the 3PAR solution, it's a four controller system, a four node system. It load balances very well. It actually does it automatically for us. Something that my team had to struggle with actually, with the EMC solution. So for us, it's been great. We've been doing maintenance upgrades on the solution with little to no impact at all on the environment. So it's been very stable for us.

I would say it's very scalable. I mean, we're not at the point now where we've had to increase the size of our SAN. But from what I've seen on paper and my discussions with the HP engineers, we're very comfortable that we're in a good spot for the next three to five years, with the solution that we selected. However, we know that if we need to move to a higher tier of a solution, that we'll feel comfortable in bringing another product in because of the flexibility the seamless transition from one platform in the 3PAR lineup to another.

The feedback I've received from the team is that they've been very responsive, very attentive to the questions that they've had. Very responsive to any problems that we had initially rolling out. I mean, problems just a little bit of growing pains and try to understand. It's a little bit than where we came from, but over the past few months, we've been running with the solution, it's been great.

We were previously using EMC. We looked at EMC, obviously, with the XtremIO product. We looked a little bit at NetApp. We haven't had a previous relationship with them, so we didn't look too deeply into it. And then we also obviously looked at HP 3PAR.

In the business that we're in, we deal with a lot of data. I like to think of ourselves as big data before big data was big data. We've been around since 1925. Obviously, there weren't computers back then, but a lot of the work that we did do as far as collecting performances was done paper based. In the last 25 years or so, we've since moved over to computer technology. In the last four or five years, what we've really seen with the advent of a lot of online musical sources, especially things like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, we're seeing a larger influx of the amount of information that we're having to digest or ingest as an organization we do processing on.

So one of the problems that we have is the throughput or the IOPS that was available to us through traditional storage array, we had a traditional tier SAN storage array and we knew that with all the new tech-all the new data that's coming in, we had to ensure that we were positioned well to be able to handle the increasing amount of data that was being sent to us on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.

The HP solution to us made a lot of sense. When I was at HP Discover last year and I saw the keynote about the $2.00 per gigabyte, that intrigued me very much so. Flash has been around for awhile, but as everyone knows, it's been a very expensive technology. For a company like ours, we really strive to drive value to our members. We've considered a not for profit, meaning that for every dollar that we collect, what's not used for operational purposes goes right back to our members. So obviously the lower we keep the cost, the more money we give back to our members and the greater benefit we provide to them. So that was one of the most intriguing things about the solution.

The other thing that really drew me to the HP 3PAR flash solution was the architecture of it. Being an architecture person infrastructure person, it made a lot of sense to me. XtremIO is a great product. but again, it was a great architecture, but a different approach to solving the same problem that we sort of had to address with the HP 3PAR system.

Performance is very important to us. Like I mentioned, we get a lot of data, we do a lot of data processing for a company of our size, and of course, costs and value for our money is very, very important to us

There's always room for improvement. You know, maybe two years from now we'll be seeing flash costing, 10 cents a gigabyte or something like that. But, no, we've been extremely happy with the solution. My team that manages it and as well as my customers, being the business and the application developers are all very excited about what flash can do for them, for their workloads.

What I recommend to other people looking at all flash solutions, I would take a look at not only the company that's selling it, but the background of the technology itself. There have been a lot of flash startups, a lot of flash startups being purchased by big name companies like Cisco, EMC, etc. So don't let the big name fool you. Do your homework. Make sure you ask the right questions, and look at the history of the product. Talk to some of the customers and get their feedback and see how they're doing with the solution.

I think there was one, I wouldn't say gotcha, but one thing that we kind of had to know going in to take advantage of some of the technology that the people had. Like the in-line de-duplication was the block size. So by default, when you deploy a Windows server it formats at the sort of 4K block size. Take advantage of that, you have to use 16K or higher, so if we had thought of that ahead of time, it would have, we would see benefits more sooner. But now that we're well into our deployment, we have obviously made that adjustment. So I would just say to make sure that people look into that before they deploy.

I would say peer reviewers are very important. You know, sales people being sales people that are trying to sell you their product, that's their job. But when you want to talk to the customers and get feedback from the people that are actually using it, the people that spend their hard earned dollars, that are actually supporting the product, I think that is very valuable in itself, and it's very important to me.

I normally go about finding info by networking, talking to some of my peers; when I do deal with sales people, I ask them for references. They obviously give you curated references, but, you know, ask the right questions and ensure that the people they're talking to are generally being honest, and they generally are. They don't want to mislead you, so it's good to have that relationship beforehand, and even afterwards, reaching out to speak to people.

The 7200 and 7400 are both easy to manage. The reporting suite is a must and gives you all the information you need to manage storage. Thin suite helps you manage how the storage is used and reclaimed, and one of the best features is the new AFC (Adaptive Flash Cache) which combined with AO (Adaptive Optimisation) really helps performance.

We have implemented two 7400 arrays replacing older EVAs with replication, we used to use CLX (Cluster Extensions for EVA) for the Windows machines, but we never had anything but manual failover for the VMware environment.

With the 7400, we implemented Peer Persistence and this removed the requirement of CLX and also gave us a similar site protection in the VMware environment meaning that we no longer have to do a manual failover.

Majority of the day to day management can be done via the GUI, but certain functions have to be setup via the command line interface such as AFC.

I have used the 7200 for over two years and the 7400 for around six months.

Deployment and migration was quite straight forward.

Both versions are very stable. The 7200 has not had any downtime since it was put into production back in November 2012.

The products that we bought both scale very easily, and were bought knowing what the maximum was (which increased on the 7200 from the time of purchase).

It's very good for the amount of times we have been in contact (not much as there's no need to make contact).

Tech support is fantastic. It seems that you have your own personal support, as we are notified whenever a new firmware/patch/update is released, and we have had the remote support team upgrade the firmware numerous times. We have had only two failed drives on the 7200, and each time the process was simple.

Prior to the 7200, we had a HP P2000 storage array, and this proved not able to cope with the workload (it was designed/implemented and used to be managed by another company) since the 7200 has been installed, there haven't been any issues.

The 7400, replaced four EVAs (two 6500s and two 8400s) and we switched these because they becoming instable causing various issues. They also lacked the failover ability for our virtual environment (without having to buy SRM).

The initial setup was straightforward as it was planned for. Also, the installation document that was filled out had all the info required to make it that way.

Both installations were carried out by myself.

For the 7200 there has been no downtime in over two years and this is priceless, whereas with the old P2000, which wasn’t designed or setup properly, we had multiple downtime periods.

For the 7400. each of the 7400s replaced an EVA 6500 and an EVA 8400 taking up three racks of space, which was condensed down to a single rack. For the first two months, we ran purely on the FC tier (tier one) and the performance was better than both the EVAs. We have three tiers of storage SSD, FC and NL and now the AFC and AO in place, performance is fantastic and we have plenty of capacity.

• EMC
• IBM

After spending months of looking at products and choosing the HP 3PAR’s the best advice is to:

• Plan the installation and migration – this saved us time in getting the new storage in production
• Think about all the features you require as they aren’t expensive and probably will save you money (Peer-Persistence was a good one for the 7400)
• Don’t buy for years – as they are easily upgraded the capacity should be sized correctly.